


Flight as a Carrier Pheonix

by GreenVeal



Category: Doctor Who, Gallifrey (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: A+ bodyguard Leela, But I got incredibly distracted, Gen, Regeneration, Regeneration Sickness, Temporary delirium, This was supposed to fit audio characters into the canon of hell bent, Time War, Very Mild Gore, but you can read it that way if you want, not really shippy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-27
Updated: 2018-05-18
Packaged: 2019-04-20 02:51:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14251473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GreenVeal/pseuds/GreenVeal
Summary: As Time War tensions build, Romana is sent on a diplomatic visit to a small Gallifreyan military outpost known as Kreat. Along the way, something goes terribly wrong and her ship crashes, leaving both her and Leela stranded in a hostile jungle.





	1. Downward Spiral

**Author's Note:**

> The original purpose of this fic was "forcing a nonexistent canon into a single rigid timeline", but then I had an idea and I rewrote the whole thing to be an au completely separate from both audio and tv "canons".  
> Sometimes it just be like that.

The troopship rattled in the wind, its segmented hull beat against itself like a war drum. The ship's interior shook with each impact, tossing its occupants into the padded walls of its corridors and hallways.

Leela had hated the ship from the moment she boarded it, and now that she had been traveling for a full day she could feel herself reaching the brink of madness. On solid ground she was a surefooted hunter and a formidable warrior, but inside this wretched contraption she couldn't keep her balance for more than a meter or so. It was as humiliating as it was infuriating.

The sterile, pillowy corridors insulted her. Out of earshot, Time Lord soldiers did the same. She couldn't sleep, she couldn't think straight, it was only a matter of time before she finally snapped and stabbed one of the particularly bold shobbogans who jeered at her from their barracks. She stabbed their inflatable mattresses instead.

Time passed, Leela spent it cycling between embarrassment, annoyance, and apathetic boredom. She headed down a corridor, walked past the captain's office, and stopped at an elaborately engraved red door. Leela raised her hand to knock on it, only to pause and admire its craftsmanship. It was an ancient thing even by Gallifreyan standards, carved from some polished, waxy stone. It bore the image of Rassilon in one of his past bodies, this one with long hair and a thin mustache on his upper lip. The visage had been done with impeccable detail, his face was restrained, his brow slightly creased and his lip barely curled. Leela had never seen a still image convey smug spite so well, she almost expected him to move across the rock, to stomp his boot atop the head of one of the Pythian Priestesses engraved at his feet.

Leela realized how distracted she'd been when the ship shook her out of her morbid daydream. Ignoring the hypnotic quality of the carving, she knocked on Rassilon's lifelike forehead.

Romana answered the door. "Leela! I'd been wondering when you'd join me." She said with a tight-lipped smile, happily letting the huntress into her workplace. The room was white with padded walls, like every other room aboard the troopship, but it was significantly less barren, papers and data storage devices cluttered every available surface. She could tell via the various documents crammed into every cabinet and drawer that there had been multiple attempts to put the mess back together, but the shaking of the ship had ultimately won the fight. Leela leapt up unto a plastifiber desk after entering the room. It was fixed to the floor, she noted, rocking back and forth on the callused soles of her feet.

Romana sat herself down in a large armchair beside the desk Leela crouched atop. She picked up a piece of paper from the armrest and unfolded it. Leela could tell it was extremely important due to the lettering it was written in, the scratchy, angular scrawl that very important Time Lords wrote very important handwritten notes in.

"What are you reading?" She asked, putting her hand on Romana's shoulder as she inched closer to the paper.

"I'm rereading the accord that had us sent here. It's very eloquently worded," She paused. "But it appears there's no reason for my presence at Kreat aside from political posturing."

Leela believed it, everything about the trip was unnecessarily flamboyant, even Romana's uniform was overblown, it had polished golden epaulettes, a garishly red cape, and it was absolutely covered in The Seal of Rassilon. The council had seen it as a show of strength during wartime, Leela saw it as a very elegant target.

"They are idiots then, our presence aboard this ship is obviously setting the crew on edge, I wouldn't be surprised if they attempt a mutiny." Leela put a little weight onto Romana's shoulder as she spoke.

The crew was mostly compromised of Scendellans and Shobbogans, who had all been drafted into war by high ranking Prydonians. Leela suspected the crew blamed her for their conscription the same way they blamed Romana. Either they saw her as part of the problem, or they thought she was some kind of trained animal.

Romana turned to face Leela. "We can stay in here for the rest of the trip, we'll reach Kreat soon, only a few spans from now.". The ship sounded out an abnormally lound bang after she finished speaking, as if punctuating her sentence.

Leela scowled, but she didn't protest. She had a sinking suspicion that she would hate the small Gallifreyan military base of Kreat when she got there. She stood up to check the door's lock, only to realize that the ship had stopped its drumming, the hull still rattled slightly, but not hard enough to shake the ship's interior. The relative silence sent a chill down Leela's spine, somehow she knew that something had gone very wrong.

"We're falling." Romana said. There was no panic in her voice, but Leela could feel her fear. "Leela, I'm heading into the engine room. You're going to hav-"

The ship lurched without warning. Papers and data pads flew into the air, Leela and Romana followed suit. Leela hit the soft wall right beside the solid stone door, Romana hit the ceiling, and then the floor.

A new noise echoed through the troopship. Something like a scream, it was a scraping, popping sound, one that made Leela picture metal being torn apart like taffy. Slowly she began to notice a sensation quite like going down in an elevator, it had been subtle at first, but it grew more intense with each passing second. Her stomach turned as she heard the screech again, this time from above. The roof of the office was starting to warp. First it started to concave, and then it started to rise, installation and small fragments of metal were falling to the floor, bolts and screws were coming loose from the structure of the ship far overhead and landing in the space between Leela and Romana.

For a brief second, the two women looked at each other, both of their faces caught somewhere between abject terror and disbelief. They broke eye contact as the floor snapped open, the change in air pressure was instantaneous, it knocked them both to the floor with hurricane-like force. Leela drove her knife into the padded floor.

She turned to face Romana, in the same moment the room split into two. The white office interior was suddenly gone and Leela realized that the chunk of floor she had attached herself to had just broke off from the rest of the room. She saw the lower barracks of the ship for only a moment as she plummeted into the sky beneath.

She held the hilt of her knife with both hands, and shut her eyes to protect them from the wind. The same wind viciously roared in her ears, leaving her effectively deaf and blind as she fell helplessly to the planet's surface.

As she fell it became harder and harder to think straight. She didn't even feel it when she hit the water, one minute she was in free fall and in the next she was sinking. Suddenly submerged, she cursed her misfortune, she hadn't been holding her breath and it was now too late to start, water filled her nostrils and ran down her throat. Opening her eyes, she could see nothing but blackness, the water was unclean, and the combination of silt and tannin made her eyes sting.

Something shifted beneath her, and for the first time in a long while, something good happened to Leela of the Sevateem. The section of flooring beneath her began to float. It effortlessly bobbed to the surface. Leela took a deep breath, as she assessed her surroundings.

She was located in a canyon of sorts, it's walls were at least thirty kilometers apart, and both of them stood a solid fifty kilometers tall. Growing between these two gargantuan cliffs was a forest of sorts. The trees themselves were just as massive as the canyon around them. The thick, warped trunks growing on the river's edge told Leela they were impossibly old, just like everything else on Gallifrey. The river itself was wide, deep, and seemingly quite slow moving. Smoke peaked out over the trees, showing Leela where the rest of the ship had wrecked.

A wave of exhaustion hit her in that moment, her legs shook slightly as she stood, but she forced herself to jump back into the river and paddle to shore. Her body had ached before, it got better, this would be no different. The feeling of grass beneath her feet came as an odd comfort, and she used it as a mental anchor while she gathered her wits.

She had to find Romana. They couldn't have landed too far apart, the depressurization would've sent her tumbling out of the ship directly after Leela. She wondered if Romana had landed in the same river as her, surely she would've been able to survive that. Leela had never seen a regeneration herself, but she knew about the process, if she had survived, even if by chance, then Romana was twice as likely to have survived. Maybe even twelve times as likely.

The thought was comforting, but the sheer number of variables involved prevented her from truly feeling at ease. She had been extremely lucky to land in the river as she did. It was unlikely that they both would have been so fortunate.

Leela pushed onwards into the forest, knife drawn. After less than a minute of walking, a small portion of the ship's wreckage came into view. A few meters of metal, insulation, and fabric stuck between two tree trunks. It looked like a piece of the captain's quarters, one third of an elaborately decorated room attached to a length of familiarly padded hallway. Underneath the carnage was a body. Leela recognized the outfit. Captain Nyunri hadn't exactly made a good impression on her in life, but she remembered his dark green armor and battered goggles.

He'd changed his body at least once before he died. Leela had known an older, slightly portly man with defined sideburns. But apparently he had died young, or at least young-looking. He had sandy-blonde hair and a thin glaze over his eyes.

It made her stomach churn, but she had to steel herself, she was looking for one person, and now she knew what to look for. Romana's bright red cape would be easy to find among the grey foliage and orange-brown canyon cliffs.

In her search Leela found another victim to the crash, a scruffy, middle aged woman in oversized shobbogan robes. She took the woman's stazer rifle, something had shot that troopship down, and Leela wanted to be prepared if she met it. After she picked the gun from off the floor she heard a crash in the forest behind her. She spun to face the noise and was surprised to see a mousey, black haired, Scendellan man peeking out at her from behind a tree.

His breathing was panicked and ragged, but he clearly hadn't been running through the forest, otherwise Leela would have heard him earlier. 

He was eying her gun, sizing her up, trying to figure out if she knew how to fire it, he was trying to figure out how he could take it from her. The man looked at the shobbogan woman's corpse and then back to Leela. He furrowed his brow, but he didn't say a word, instead he slunk back behind the tree, clumsily walking deeper into the forest.

The interaction was as fleeting as it was tense. But it gave Leela hope, if that man had survived the crash, then there was a chance Romana had survived also.

When Leela finally spotted something a synthetic red, it took that feeling of hope. It was the carved door from Romana's office. Most of it, at least. It lay scattered on the forest floor in six or seven pieces. The door had only ever made Leela uncomfortable during her time in close quarters with it, but something about seeing it broken made her even more uneasy. The thing had clearly been some ancient piece of Prydonian history, and she would be the only person to see it to its grave. The thought was haunting, but she struggled to articulate why.

She pushed that stream of consciousness from her mind and instead thought about the door's position in relation to the captain's quarters, and what that meant about Romana's location. She was mapping out the the ship' wreckage, trying to figure out where the Time Lady could have landed.

Night was beginning to set over the canyon, and the forest itself was getting cold. Thin, dry air made every gust of wind resonate within Leela's bones. It was a feeling completely different from the air conditioned corridors of Arcadia, and yet it was just as alien to her, maybe even a little bit more so.

She was beginning to loose hope when she saw the first conclusive sign of Romana. A section of red cape hanging between two broken tree branches. Suddenly, Leela's body didn't ache, and she found herself moving on autopilot. Romana had clearly hit the tree at an angle, based off the damage to the foliage she was practically flying sideways.

The thought made Leela cringe, but she diligently followed Romana's path to impact, occasionally finding another scrap of cape. She was running through the forest when she reached the edge of a ravine.

Under different circumstances, Leela would have stopped to consider the oddity of the canyon-within-a-canyon, maybe even pondering the tectonics that created it. But her mind was focused on only one thing, a small, still body laying on the floor of the gorge. She leapt down the sides of the ravine, and much to her terror, she could begin to make out a puddle of golden, glossy, Time Lord blood on the rocks. Her feet hit pebbles and she rushed to the body.

Leela realized two things very quickly. One: this body was not small, this Time Lord was almost twice as big as Leela. Two: this Time Lord was breathing. Leela inspected their robes, even in the dark of night she could see the garish Prydonian colors. Gently, she put a hand on the Time Lord's back, they had landed face down, and probably at some terrible speed.

"Romana?" Leela whispered, she'd known about regeneration for longer than she had been on Gallifrey. She was almost ashamed of herself for being so shaken by the change. This was Romana. This couldn't be anyone else.

There was no response. That hit Leela harder than any regeneration could. She refused to let her concern escalate into panic, she carefully flipped Romana over and used a shred of torn cape to wipe off the blood. It had gotten everywhere, face, chest, shoulders, hair, beard. The hands were the worst, they looked like they'd been recently degloved all the way down to the metacarpal bones, the skinless fingers had been bent into unrecognizable shapes, it was hard to tell where the palm of the hand ended and where the finger began. Leela didn't dare touch them, worried she would only make the damage worse. She suspected they were what Romana had first landed on.

It was likely they had regenerated midair, hitting the ground with a brand new body. Leela mentally ran over everything she knew about regeneration, it was mostly antecdotal and contradictory. A funny story Andred had told her once, a Gallifreyian radio drama, a threat some bounty hunter had yelled at The Doctor. Nothing she could actually use to help Romana.

Weren't injuries like this supposed to heal post-regeneration? Was the new body particularly susceptible to diseases? She'd heard the phrase 'regeneration sickness' thrown around before, but she'd never stopped to actually learn more about it. Was it fatal?

She stopped herself mid-thought, she wouldn't be able to answer those questions and she knew it. Meanwhile, she had problems that she could actually solve. She needed to prioritize shelter, night had already fallen and she had to get the both of them somewhere safe. She pushed the stazer rifle into her belt and leaned over Romana. Leela struggled to pick the Time Lord up, they had apparently gained at least two hundred pounds of muscle during the process of regeneration. Leela couldn't help but feel like that was some sort of cheating.

She managed it anyway, lifting Romana up bridal-style and looking for something resembling shelter. Off in the distance, Leela heard the sound of stazer rifles firing, followed by the droning screams of daleks. For a second, Leela froze, her grip on Romana faltered and she felt herself break out into a cold sweat. It sounded far away, but that was still far too close.


	2. The Stranger

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here it is, the chapter I wrote this whole fic around. Almost 4000 words of characters talking alongside some introspection on regeneration, my magnet opium.
> 
> Jokes aside, this will probably be the longest chapter I put in this fic, I don’t even expect the final chapter to get this long.

Romana started to feel something, not quite awake, but no longer completely asleep, this feeling was dragging him closer and closer towards consciousness. Almost alert now, he realized the offending feeling was pain, and that was the realization that shook him from his sleep.

With wakefulness came even more realizations, he was anatomically male, resting on some sort of inflatable mattress, slightly damp, and apparently amnesiac. The last of which left him unable to figure out why any of these things had seemed out of the ordinary. 

Drearily he began to realize that he hadn't fallen asleep with any of those traits, in fact, he remembered that he hadn't fallen asleep at all. Rather, he had been knocked out, he'd hit his head on the ceiling in some kind of white room. The memory was still incomplete, but it was becoming clearer, slowly fading back into his head along with a few scattered snapshots of his past. 

It wasn't much, but it did explain his situation somewhat. He had recently regenerated, and someone was taking care of him during his regeneration sickness. Either that, or he had become a prisoner of war. 

In an attempt to gather more information he tried to sit upright on the mattress, only to be struck with a wave of pain. As he moved the sensation of pins and needles wracked through his entire body. The shock of it forced his eyes open, and he involuntarily let out a yelp, or he would have had his throat not been so dry. The resulting sound was a low rasp, an awful, crackling cry for help. 

His vision was blurred, and he struggled to keep his focus on a single object, he looked around the room, but he wasn't learning anything while doing this. Romana was simultaneously overwrought with hundreds of minute details about his surroundings and the complete inability to understand what he was actually looking at. 

Overwhelmed, he shut his eyes once again, his head ached and he was beginning to wonder if there was any legitimate benefit to waking up in the first place. However, that impression faded quickly. When he opened his eyes again the world was clear. 

Romana was instantly both shellshocked and awed by his environment, which was, due to his recent regeneration, perhaps the single most fascinating place he had ever been. 

He was in a cave, positioned at the end of a long, snaking tunnel that tapered off into darkness. A small fire lit the corner of the cave opposite to the inflated mattress he had woken up on. The walls were lined with sheets of rust-red metal as tall as him — however tall he was in this body — to his right there was a pile of broken radios and stazer rifles. To his left he found a small upturned bowl, beneath it was a puddle of cold water. 

There was some underlying unfamiliarity to everything he saw, as if he was caught in someone else’s dream. Even though he had probably never seen this place before.

The space around him at best a particularly well crafted foxhole, but the newness of Romana's eyes made it all seem compelling and beautiful. He was embarrassed by his own astonishment. Even if he was alone, it was completely undignified. 

Looking into the far side of the cave he couldn't make out an entrance, but he could feel a faint wind from that direction. Logically, that meant the tunnel had some sort of a bend in it, something that would have perfectly obscured this little cavern from the outside world. It had clearly taken time to set up, and perhaps even more time to find, which left Romana to wonder how long he had been unconscious.

He gandered with the idea of standing up to walk around the small cavern, but his legs refused to be moved, and he suspected he wouldn't have the energy to keep himself standing upright.

And then, with a blink, his vision blurred again. 

As he tried to regain his bearings in the suddenly overstimulating nightmare of a tunnel his head grew sore and he began to shake slightly. The bodily tremors only got worse the longer he sat upright, and he was forced to lay back down. He shifted his weight on the mattress, and suddenly he was wrought with hot, stabbing pains in his hands. But without clear vision he had no way of inspecting whatever was making them sore. 

He opened and shut his eyes repeatedly, hoping to clear his eyes as he had before. Unfortunately all he succeeded in doing was making himself monumentally dizzy. He leaned his head against the cave wall behind him and groaned. 

Even while in pain his memories were coming back to him, and he found himself considering his past decision to regenerate by choice by means of a machine. It had been painless and elective, the polar opposite of his current predicament. Romana couldn’t figure whether that choice had made him more or less prepared for a proper regeneration. 

He could feel himself fading back into sleep, but he didn't have the energy to fight it. The thought made him angry, comforted, terrified, and vaguely amused all at once. It was with that tidal wave of contradictory emotions Romana realized that his personality was still forming, or more accurately, changing. He would've lingered on the thought more — maybe even tried to figure out how he should feel about it, but by then, unconscious had caught up with him.

\-----

Leela traced her fingers across the hilt of her knife, it's leather was beginning to wear worn from use. She would have already replaced the tatterdemalion animal skin had it not been obtained on her homeworld. Oddly, it was hard to admit to herself that she had kept it out of sentimentality, and even harder to admit it had been a conscious decision. As such, the leather was now paper thin in the areas her hand would grip during use, and Leela was beginning to consider which Gallifreyan creature would have the ideal hide for tanning.

The thought didn't stick in her mind for long, and once again her mind drifted to escape, capture, and extermination. She had already spent hours concerned with finding a safe way to Kreat, and she had already concluded it would be impossible for her to find the base on her own. But that didn't stop her from fretting, she felt a constant ticking clock in the back of her mind, counting down the remaining seconds she had before her and Romana would be discovered by the daleks who had shot down the troopship.

Leela did not know enough of the technology and tactics of her enemies to gauge the likelihood of such an event. But she had knowledge enough to prepare. She had found a deep crack in the canyon-within-a-canyon wall, one hidden by shrubbery and gravel, and fortified it farther. To block scanners, she used a few broken segments of the fallen ship's hull as a shield, beating the plating onto the walls of the cave with a rock. She'd taken radios from the wreckage, but she didn't dare use them out of fear she'd accidentally summon up a dalek fleet. She had gathered a stockpile of stazer rifles, even if she could only wield one at a time, it felt wrong to leave weapons on what would likely become a battlefield.

Leela's thoughts were interrupted by a soft groan from the makeshift futon at the far corner of the cave. She turned to face the cry, but the only movement she could detect was the steady rise and fall of Romana's breathing and the flickering of firelight. Leela still struggled to accept the sleeping figure as her longtime employer and friend, but it was plain to see she was looking at a creature in need of her help and protection. 

He had apparently stirred earlier while she was out scavenging. And in that time he’d managed to break his hands free from the splints she’d crafted, spilling the scrapmetal-bowl of water she had been keeping beside him in the process. After returning to the cave to find Romana’s hands unbound, Leela promised to herself she would stay put and watch over him until he was fully awake.

She moved closer to the time lord at the sound of another wordless complaint. His eyes were still closed, but his face was twisted into a very conscientious grimace. Leela kept herself from shaking the time lord awake and instead took in his features. 

His face was scared, pale, thin marks ran across the bridge of his nose down to his cheeks, where they trailed under a thick beard that bled into dark, almost shoulder length hair. 

Beyond that, he was massive, tall and broad and an absolute pain in the ass to lug from location to location. It had never really occurred to her that a time lord could change size during regeneration, probably since it was conceptually impossible. The entire process struck her as something deeply unnatural, the change in size was only the most tangible proof of it, nothing under Xoanon grew a foot and a half in a matter of minutes. Leela had ended up cutting off the final scraps of Leela’s garishly Prydonian vestments herself, fearful they would cut off the circulation in his legs or arms. She’d replaced the elegant uniform with a Scendellan trenchcoat she found discarded in the jungle. She’d also kept the metal epaulettes, as they seemed like a useful tool for identification, if that would be necessary. 

Romana yawned, attempted to bring his hand to his face, and then stopped when the splints restricted his movement. He sat up quickly, and Leela leapt backwards on instinct. In a matter of seconds she’d made her way across the cave, hiding herself in the shadows of the tunnel bend. Obviously, he had still seen her. He stared at Leela from across the tunnel, and he wasn’t just looking at her, he was concentrating on her. His eyes were wide yet focused, his brow was slightly furrowed, altogether making a confused, maybe frightened expression.

––––

Romana recognized the woman, her face and body were obscured by darkness, but even her movements were familiar. Smooth and swift like a savannah animal. Even when lit by flicking candlelight her long, controlled steps were easily placed in his memory.

He looked down, to the supports on his (seemingly fully functional) hands, and then back to the woman. He ripped off one support, and then the other, gently placing them at his side.

“You’re Leela?” He said, sounding unsure of it himself. She moved out of the shadows, revealing a familiar face. Her eyes were narrowed, but not aggressively so. 

“I am.” She stood and begun to walk closer towards him. When she was in arms length of him, she held out a hand “And it would seem you are Romana.”.

He reached for her hand — and his knuckles cracked — as he pulled himself up to two thirds of his full height, for he didn’t realize he could stand any taller. The idea amused Leela, but she didn’t comment on it, instead she used her hand to hoist the Time Lord up until he stood straight. In response, Romana took a step backwards, half expecting to step off a stool or stepladder, consequently, he walked right into the plated wall behind him. He brought one heavily scarred hand to his face, attempting to hide from the embarrassment of his own shock, only to surprise himself further via the whiskers on his face.

It was in that moment Leela saw the inherent physical comedy of regeneration and she couldn’t stop herself from laughing. She would have felt bad about it had Romana not began laughing alongside her. It was a loud, undignified sort of laugh, and Leela suspected she wouldn’t hear it again for a while.

“I’m — actually quite sorry about this, I must look like a caveman in a bathrobe.” He’d already begun to groom his facial hair when he spoke, somehow setting it straight without aide from a mirror. Leela found herself frustrated with how Typically Time Lord the behavior was, thankfully Andred rarely preened himself in such a manner.

“You look like you’ve fallen from out of a spacecraft, so do I.” Leela said. 

It was actually an incredibly comforting interaction to Leela, this wasn’t the first time she’d rolled her eyes at Romana for acting like any other time lord. Whenever it did occur it reminded Leela that time lord custom, frivolous and hedonistic as it was, went beyond politics and backstabbing. It was alien to her, of course, but that was typical to Romana.

She picked one of his epaulettes up off the floor and handed it to him. Laughing still, but sympathetic. 

“Thank you.” He strapped the golden Seal of Rassilon over his coat, when he was done, he looked around the cave once more. “What exactly happened to the troopship?”

"Daleks, I can hear them while scavenging the wreck of the ship. I would have tried radioing Kreat," Leela gestured to a small handheld radio beside the mattress. "But I don't want to risk them tracking our location."

Romana closed his eyes and nodded. "Smart, but these things- the radios, they’re untraceable really. That was absolutely—" He stopped mid sentence as he started to take a few shaky steps around the tunnel, Leela prepared to catch him. "That's wonderful, but—" He looked down and squinted slightly. "You're so small!" He sounded almost concerned. He then looked straight ahead, which was almost a foot above Leela's own head. He looked back down. He experimentally shifted from foot to foot before softly asking —

"How tall am I?" 

Leela noted that he seemed to be fading into some regeneration induced delirium. His gaze seemed dull and his breathing somewhat shallow. But she didn’t feel extraordinary concerned, seeing that the last time she underestimated Gallifreyan durability, Romana had grown a whole new set of hands. She remained calm and answered his question.

“Though I cannot say how tall you are in Gallifreyian measurements, I would think you’re roughly two meters tall, maybe an inch under that." 

Outside of Romana's volition he felt himself beginning to smile. He looked up, and his face was only a few inches away from the cave ceiling. 

He began to laugh again. Leela denied herself a sigh. “Are you feeling well?” Despite her best attempts, the sigh hung on her words. 

Romana stopped laughing, “it’s just because I’m having a bout.” He said, grinning. His gaze wasn’t focused on Leela, or anything else really, instead he slyly smiled at the floor, walls, and shadows. 

“A bout of what?” Leela kept her voice steady, but she was beginning to second guess her confidence in Romana’s health.

“Regeneration sickeningly- sucking.-“ he pushed his head into his hands before holding them over his hearts. “Regeneration sickening- Regeneration sickness.” 

Despite the obvious struggle to speak, he sounded contentedly mellow as he stuttered. Leela struggled to respond to his answer and instead took a small step back. He didn’t seem to understand the social cue and took a step forwards, he wobbled as he did so and ended up plummeting face first into the cave floor. 

Leela kept the girth between them, but crouched down to meet him after he fell. The time lord’s heavy breathing filled the silence. Romana looked shocked, he seemed transfixed by his own blinking. Even through the tan on his skin Leela could see a blush, or potentially the first sign of a fever. He seemed to be sweating slightly, she hadn’t even known time lords could sweat before today. He gathered his legs and arms beneath him and moved to a sitting position.

“I-“ He stopped, but this time he was obviously thinking about how to continue, and Leela understood that the regeneration sickness had passed, at least temporarily. “I’m sorry about that, I should probably explain myself while I can.”

“Regeneration has certain after effects if you can’t prepare for it properly. So any trauma induced regeneration typically leads to something called regeneration sickness, it’s not actually a disease, and it’s not actually dangerous — typically not dangerous. But it makes an individual very impulsive, it’s sort of vestigial honestly, supposedly it helps you protect yourself post regeneration,” He looked at Leela to see how she was taking his explanation, but her face revealed nothing, she stared at him intently, wordlessly pressuring him to continue. “But it mostly serves to confuse anyone suffering from it. I don’t think I was under for too long, so I might have slept off the brunt of it. Ideally, that was the tail end and I wore it out when I woke up alone.”

Leela was struck with how normal his speech sounded, he was fine, she had known it all along. Typical. The odd part of the equation was still the transformation in itself. The man sitting across from her was undeniably Romana, she didn’t doubt it for a second, but she couldn’t shake the feeling she was talking to a stranger. Frustratingly, he felt like both, simultaneously a close friend and a completely new person she had never met before. 

“I understand.” She said, scooting up to the inflatable mattress and rolling unto it. “Thank you.”

Romana realized his seat had been officially taken from him. He decided to take it as a compliment, Leela could relax around him despite his regeneration. 

“Are you stable enough to help me think of a way out of this jungle?” She looked into the cave bend as she spoke. 

“We’re going to need a vehicle of some sort if we’re headed to Kreat. I already know that. Even from here Kreat’s in range of these radios, we might be able to establish contact with them if we leave this cave.”

“The daleks have a flying platform with them, I saw it in the air while gathering supplies.”

“A flying- a- like a what?”

Leela frowned at his skipping speech but she elected to say nothing about it. “Like a flying stage with a guardrail, just hovering”.

“MmmmMM-“ Romana rubbed the sleep from his eyes before answering coherently. “I’ve never heard of daleks flying such a thing, how many daleks do you think could potentially fit atop it?”

“Can’t say, I kept far away from it to avoid being spotted.” 

Romana closed his eyes once more, Leela couldn’t tell if he was deep in thought or fighting off another unfortunate paroxysm of regeneration sickness. He sat down on the cave floor before he spoke again. “We can theoretically use the radios to signal to Kreat, but we’ll have to leave this cave first” 

“But can we be sure Kreat has not been attacked? If the daleks managed to enter Gallifrey, it’s unlikely they would only send seven units, this must be part of something larger.”

Romana had laid down beside her as she spoke, he looked nearly asleep, but apparently he was still lucid enough to reply. “That’s impossible, before the troopship crashed I had access to live newsfeed, if something had happened to the transduction barrier I would have heard. Even beyond that, there’s no way a dalek fleet could even reach the transduction barrier, a small vessel would be a better strategy, and that still wouldn’t work”

It was said with such genuine confidence that Leela almost found herself agreeing with him, but she couldn’t let go of the sinking feeling that neither of them truly understood the greater picture. As the time lord sat still, she surrendered her space on the mattress, standing up and grabbing a two-way radio from off the ground.

It was shaped like a conch shell, white and gold with a thin black wire hanging out one side. The position of the wire changed the range of the radio, the higher the tip was raised the wider the range the radio could pick signals. Leela found it surprisingly simple for Gallifreyan technology. She considered the dangers of staying another night in the jungle and weighed over the risks of using the contraption herself.

Romana took the opportunity to roll up onto the mattress, mumbling something about hunger as he turned. Leela assented with the sentiment, even if she didn’t understand most of his pseudo-coherent grumbling. He took a long breath before saying:  
“You should know I’m fully aware of all you must have done to do this, to save my life. You have preformed extraordinarily — I could never have asked for a better bodyguard.”

Surprised, Leela replied with something between a nod and a bow of the head. “I know.” She said, reverent but occupied. “But now you need to rest.” By the time she had spoken, Romana had already heard her request, and once again he was muttering about hunger in his sleep.

She silently walked into the dark bend of the tunnel, as she approached the entrance, the walls grew closer together. The sound of light rain came as a comfort as she sat down at the mouth of the cave. The radio activated with a shake of her wrist, and she began to work the antenna up and down. 

An almost musical hum droned back in response, it was just static, albeit oddly pleasant static. She would pick up various empty channels, or occasionally faded voices too diluted to understand. 

With each new station she would speak a message.  
“My name is Leela, with me is Romanadvoratrelundar of Prydon, we are stranded somewhere in the jungle north of Kreat. We were taking a troopship south from Arcadia when our ship was shot down by multiple daleks, do not track us unless you are ready to engage.”   
She would repeat it twice before moving the wire in her hand and changing the station. 

She had kept the process going for what she assumed was an hour of earth time when she finally leaned back in frustration. Her arm was growing sore and she was rapidly growing tired. To clear her mind she walked around the narrow entrance of the cave, two steps to the left, turn, then two steps to the right. 

And in the corner of her eye she saw him, the weasel-faced Scendellan from the day before. He stood at the very edge of the ravine, many meters away. Leela doubted he was capable enough to track her, and even if he was, the rain would have washed away any signs of her scavenging. She suspected she had the element of surprise, but she stayed careful, her movements slowed as she slid her knife from its hilt. She was dropping into a crouch when he yelled out:

“Look, human. I know you’re here, I know you’re living down in one of those caves, you’re going to help me out, or I’m going to get us both killed.” Despite the volume Leela could hear the desperation in his voice. He didn’t elaborate on his threat, but she took it very seriously. In only a matter of seconds she had her response.

“Walk closer, I’ll tell you when to stop.”

**Author's Note:**

> No beta we die like mem.  
> \--- ---  
> Comments are lovely, and they can influence my work, so if you have a thought, feel free to share!


End file.
